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Thursday, 5 March 2015

Mansions of Madness - the characters

This is probably becoming old-hat to any regular reader, but i will reiterate, that you don't have to labor over models for ages to make them look "reasonable" Boardgames look so much better with painted figures, even if those figures have only very simple paint schemes. Case in point is these characters from the Arkham series of game, specifically, the ones from Mansions of Madness.

Now the cool thing about this is that these characters are usable in all four Arkham games. Arkam Horror, Elder Sign, Mansions and Eldritch Horror. Also, i purchased the pre-painted figures for all the characters no included in Mansions. So I have painted figures for all 48 odd characters in that family of games.

Which is pretty sweet My usual "basic approach" of doing models quickly is repeated here. A solid base coat that is done in 2 layers normally to ensure coverage. An ink wash, so highlighting or dry-brushing, and a tiny amount of detail work.

The one tricky thing on these guys here, is the pin stripe suit. Now that is a basic job, it is literally some grey lines painted over the black undercoat. Nothing more complicated than that, but it looks surprisingly good.

The Harvey model on the left is a great example of the deception in my painting. It looks like i meticulously highlighted the suit and did some fine detail work. The truth is that this is a two layer base coat + ink + drybrushing. Nothing more, and it took way less than 30 minutes to do. I was painting these guys in batches of 4, just to allow for drying time. GW has some fabulous inks and you can see the "agrx earthshade" at work across the different browns i employed on these models. It is literally doing all the work for me.

I am also lazy enough to not remove the mold lines....... and it's really noticeable on Jenny on the far right.

Oh, and check out the "camoshade" ink on the green dress. That turned out really well.

So, i get back to the original point. Models for boardgames are pieces for the game first, and works of art second. They will suffer a lot of "wear and tear" so you don't need to be a Michelangelo for every paint job.

There is a lot to say about amazingly well painted models. But don't let expert painting put you off the notion that you can have "good" looking models with a small amount of time and practice. And good is great once they are on the board.